“Apple Computer said Monday that it will miss the deadline for shipping its Xsan storage management software. The $999 product, which serves as a file system for storage gear, was scheduled to launch by Monday, the last day of autumn, but has been held back,” Ina Fried reports for CNET News. ‘”Xsan will not ship this year; it will ship early next year,’ Apple said in response to an inquiry from CNET News.com. The company would not say what caused the delay.”
“The product is designed to further Apple’s position in the clustering market. Xsan allows multiple computers to concurrently access terabytes worth of storage housed on Xserve RAID disks, Apple’s rack-mounted storage system,” Fried reports.
Full article here.
More info about Apple’s Xsan here.
Uh-ohhh. Here’s hoping the “pundits” don’t overreact to this announcement.
They already have. There was bad news on the stock market today.
Two views are possible of this:
The view of those committed to only shipping software when its quality is beyond reasonable doubt (including myself) will say that a delay in releasing the final product is justified when customer’s will be entrusting up to 64TB of data per xSan implementation.
And then there will be the response of the Thurrotts of this world who want to have their cake and eat it: for them, it’ll be another example of Apple promising something it can’t be trusted to deliver, although – if Apple would have shipped and there would have been problems – these same people would have criticised Apple’s commitment to quality.
I guess there’s always the third community: Wall St and private investors. To be honest, anyone who thinks that xSan is going to be a vital part of Apple’s P+L for the next three years and over-reacts accordingly is an idiot who should be barred from owning a stock portfolio or even having a bank account.
Better to ship late and right than early and buggy. This is PRO software and the stakes are high. We do not need another mess like the late 10.2x releases leading up to Panther that broke basic functionality on Apple software/apps. With all of the changes coming with Tiger, I have no doubt they are getting in all of the last minute tweaks. You will see it demoed at MWSF.
What’s with this.. last day of the season shit..
They did something similar with the Canadian iTunes Store..
‘looks like we’re gonna miss it..
looks like we’re gonna miss it..
looks like we’re gonna miss it..
Okay we’ll ship it next year..
Somebody wanna make that announcement?’
Maybe Apple will find how to fix the Firewire external drive saga too.